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Lot Essay
Alfred Sisley’s Saint-Mammès depicts a wild riverbank under a heavy, cloudy sky through which a cold light shines melancholically. Sisley framed this simple subject in a persuasive composition: the perspective lines traced by the river and by the path in the grass divide the lower part of the picture into asymmetrical triangular shapes, while the ample sky above amplifies the sense of receding view. Achieving an impressive atmospheric effect, the brisk brushstrokes with which Sisley executed the grass and the water find a lyrical counterpoint in the softer effects of the sky.
At the time when he painted Saint-Mammès in 1880, Sisley had just moved to the region, settling at Veneux-Nadon, south of Fontainebleau. The confluence of the Seine and the Loing in that area fascinated the painter, who would return to Saint-Mammès several times in order to paint its banks and river views. Sisley’s move to the Fontainebleau region may have brought back memories from the beginning the artist’s career: it was there that he had begun to paint in the early 1860s, together with Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Frédéric Bazille.
Throughout the 1880s, Sisley continued to explore the area, developing his technique. In his works, he started to use several types of brushstrokes, specifically changing his touch in order to capture a mood or a particular element of the landscape. This approach would fully fledge in a series of views of Saint-Mammès that the artist executed in 1881 (S. Patin, ‘Veneux-Nadon and Moret-sur-Loing: 1880-1899’, pp. 183-187, in Alfred Sisley, exh. cat., London, 1992, p. 183). Executed a year earlier, Saint-Mammès already carries a prefiguration of this development in Sisley’s art. In its subject and technique, Saint-Mammès is a testimony to the artistic plenitude Sisley found near Fontainebleau. Gustave Geffroy, one of the earliest historians of Impressionism, wrote in his 1923 monograph on the artist: ‘Sisley… had found his country (…) the fringes of the Forest of Fontainebleau, the small towns strung out along the banks of the Seine and the Loing: Moret, Saint-Mammès and the rest…’ (quoted in S. Patin, Ibid., p. 183).
At the time when he painted Saint-Mammès in 1880, Sisley had just moved to the region, settling at Veneux-Nadon, south of Fontainebleau. The confluence of the Seine and the Loing in that area fascinated the painter, who would return to Saint-Mammès several times in order to paint its banks and river views. Sisley’s move to the Fontainebleau region may have brought back memories from the beginning the artist’s career: it was there that he had begun to paint in the early 1860s, together with Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Frédéric Bazille.
Throughout the 1880s, Sisley continued to explore the area, developing his technique. In his works, he started to use several types of brushstrokes, specifically changing his touch in order to capture a mood or a particular element of the landscape. This approach would fully fledge in a series of views of Saint-Mammès that the artist executed in 1881 (S. Patin, ‘Veneux-Nadon and Moret-sur-Loing: 1880-1899’, pp. 183-187, in Alfred Sisley, exh. cat., London, 1992, p. 183). Executed a year earlier, Saint-Mammès already carries a prefiguration of this development in Sisley’s art. In its subject and technique, Saint-Mammès is a testimony to the artistic plenitude Sisley found near Fontainebleau. Gustave Geffroy, one of the earliest historians of Impressionism, wrote in his 1923 monograph on the artist: ‘Sisley… had found his country (…) the fringes of the Forest of Fontainebleau, the small towns strung out along the banks of the Seine and the Loing: Moret, Saint-Mammès and the rest…’ (quoted in S. Patin, Ibid., p. 183).